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In Prague

On Friday I finally got the keys to my apartment, or at least the key. I've left them two because they haven't finished repainting it between renters. People in Vienna tend to stay put a long time -- the previous tenant was there 7 years. I also bought a bed and a sofa to furnish it. Then I went back to the KLI & finished a paper I'm writing with a former undergraduate about tracking the change in meanings of words from automatic text analysis -- we used the Bible, Shakespeare and a modern corpus of ordinary language. It was kind of silly choices because there was a lot of poetic use of language in the first two of those, but it proved that you could see evolving concepts of gender, animals and morality. Then I had to finish a grant review & then go home and cook dinner (at midnight!) and pack... my train left at 8:25am on Saturday.

Now I am in Prague for the European Primate Society meeting -- my student Hagen is giving a paper there. Then the next week he and another former undergraduate student, Steve Butler, are giving papers at the European Social Simulation Association meeting in Toulouse. I was supposed to go to that, but there is another meeting at the KLI about innovation in cultural evolution, and also there is press release party for our special issue in a famous journal, so I will go to England & see Will next Saturday and then fly back to Vienna, stay home and receive my furniture delivery, then go to the conference. Hagen and Will will both come stay with me the week after that (17th Sept.)

Today we are going over Hagen's talk and therefore also the current progress of his PhD research, and then we are meeting up with some friends at the Charles University here (founded in the 1200's sometime... is very cool, I gave a talk there a year ago in January) to talk about some AI code we are collaborating on .

Hagen's talk is on Tuesday and he is very nervous! I have told him that if someone makes him realize that he did something wrong, the right thing to say is "thank you", because the point of science is building knowledge as a community. Anyway, better to find out now than when he is defending his dissertation!

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